New World Order, Old World Mess - Essay Example

New World Order, Old World Mess? This essay discusses the view on the New World Order, how it would be affected by the impact of global forces such as the technological revolution, industrialization, population growth, changing social values, and religious conflict, and the roles that different nations will play. The first part explains what a new world order is and the key historical events that defined past world orders, the actual events that followed, and the impact 9/11 had on perceptions of what the future brings. The second part recounts the driving forces that defined past world orders and how these drivers would affect the new world order. The third part proposes the roles of today’s powerful nations in shaping the future. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of the Cold War and signified the failure of communism. Over the next two years, the Iron Curtain opened and revealed that the socio-economic experiment to apply Marxist-Leninist principles to manage nations and peoples had been, in fact, a farce. In the ideological face off that began after the Second World War, the American and English models of capitalism and democracy proved victorious as shown by the social prosperity of America, Western Europe, and parts of Asia, most especially China, a nation that since 1978 had been practicing a hybrid political system that combined capitalism with communism (Kagan 32-33). So impressive were these events that President Bush (1991) spoke of an “emerging new world order” characterized by peace and democracy that represented mankind’s “long dreamed-of vision we’ve all worked toward for so long.” The “world order” metaphorically defined the balance among the powerful nations of the world and how nations are aligned behind these powers. The principle behind the term “world order” is the assumption that nations share the same values of peace and prosperity for its people but may have different strategies for attaining such goals. Thus, for almost half a century after the Second World War, the world order was defined as a stand-off between communism and capitalist democracy, Russia and America, East and West, each one convinced its formula to attain the social order – progress, peace and prosperity, happiness – was right. The ensuing cold war was an effort to prove which side was right in best achieving a world order, a state of utopia, a paradise where nations are at peace and all components of social order are in place, people freely choosing their rulers, and everyone justly rewarded for their work. This new world order, they hoped, would be the fruit of cooperation and understanding among nations that shared the same values of peace, justice, happiness, and freedom (Russett 24-33). The downfall of communism proved that capitalist democracy was better, but not necessarily the perfect solution, and for a brief period the world’s powers thought that the ingredients for crafting a new world order were in place, one dream and one strategy of nations under the West’s model of free market economics and political democracy. However, instead of an era of peace, what followed was a turbulent decade until 9/11 which made peoples and nations realize that their shared values and their definitions of utopia differed, and that different peoples, nations, and cultures understood peace, justice, happiness, and freedom in different, even conflicting, ways, making the new world order look similar to the previous ones characterized by chaos (Fukuyama 120-121). The end of the 20th century was not the peaceful era everyone thought it would be. The collapse of the East released pent-up cultural tensions that had simmered for centuries, artificially controlled or artfully concealed by the cold war (Fukuyama 1993: 213). Even before the euphoria of Berlin faded, violent explosions were felt in Kuwait, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia (Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia), the former U.S.S.R. (Russia, Chechnya, Armenia, and Azerbaijan), and Africa (Rwanda, Sudan, Liberia, and Angola). These conflicts were added to longstanding global tensions in China (Tiananmen), the Middle East (Israel-Palestine-Lebanon), India-Pakistan, and Korea (North-South). Almost two decades since the end of the cold war, the new world order has been redefined as a war against terrorism, as despots used by both the East and the West showed their true colors and began biting the hands that fed them. From east to west and north to south, political leaders who suddenly found themselves without a cause continued to do battle with legitimate regimes in Africa, Yugoslavia or Iraq, filling up the political vacuum left by communism as in Afghanistan and Chechnya, or finding fault with America, the world’s superpower by default (Kagan 63). It is the nature of every conflict to find legitimate reasons to justify its cause, as it had been so in the past. Palestine had been “liberating” itself for years to justify terrorism. Iraq invaded Kuwait to grab oil fields it claimed was “justly” theirs. Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats engaged in ethnic cleansing to create geographical buffers to ensure territorial peace and stability. Chechnya refused to be under the mighty hand of Russia. Arab terrorists wanted to punish arrogant America in 9/11; America overthrew Saddam to destroy the axis of evil, and Latin American drug money fuelled violence. The new world order paradise everyone thought was within grasp turned out to be a mirage. For those familiar with previous world orders, the present one looked familiar. The goals are the same, but the importance and manner of reaching those goals continued to differ, reflecting differences in social and cultural values among nations (Mahbubani 11). As America is learning the hard way in Iraq, installing democracy in a nation that is not ready for it can be a tough challenge and getting rid of a dictator may not be the best solution to restore a nation to its people. This is hard to understand for the West that is used to freedom, but the toughest challenge of all is how to teach democracy to those who may not even want it because they don’t know what it is. In this sense, America had much in common with the Christian and Islamic hordes of the first millennium that imposed their beliefs by force with the best intentions, but all sides must expect many years (maybe even centuries) of bloody resistance (Huntington 193-5). The new world order is turning out to be very much like the old (Skidmore 186-7). Past world orders were driven by population growth that led to economic pressures that, in turn, were solved by taking over other nations through colonization to gain access to resources. Superpowers like Spain, Netherlands, England and France became effective colonizers because they lacked the natural resources to sustain their growing populations and economies. Germany and Japan, two countries without resources, attempted to join the world’s elite of superpowers and failed. What these nations shared, though, were their technological and industrial resources that allowed them to turn raw materials from their colonies into goods their people enjoyed (Kagan 13). Today, these same drivers are acting in ways that make it difficult to predict how the new world order would turn out. Populations are declining in the developed world and rising in the poorer nations, creating waves of immigration that is changing the social and economic culture of nations. China’s daring social, economic, and political experiment is turning it into one of the richest nations in the world, threatening to change the balance of power in Asia where Japan and South Korea, two nations that have been going at it for centuries, are currently the economic leaders. Technological innovations continue to drive economic progress, as it has been doing for centuries. Advances in information and telecommunications technologies are making the world a smaller place, and making it more dangerous as weapons of violence are easier to make or buy and use for anyone with a bad attitude. As Al-Qaeda continues to prove, it knows how to use the mass media to sell its cause to the world. It uses the Internet and credit card systems to buy tickets and deliver suicide bombers to their targets (to add insult to injury, these tickets end up not getting paid). On the other hand, technology can also be used to shape the world order in a positive way, as it was also media that the West used in the previous world order to show the East how western prosperity looked like. Industrialization has also made it cheaper for more people to enjoy goods. It helped China grow faster, but it is also horribly polluting the world and destroying the environment. Besides, industrialization is contributing to the widening of economic and social gaps between the rich and the poor, creating a North-South divide that provides a fertile ground for discontent against not only America but the rest of the developed world (Kagan 30). It is this writer’s opinion that the new world order would be characterized as a battle between the North and the South, with poor countries up against the rich countries. Discontent will come from both sides, with poor peoples in poor nations seeing in terrorism a solution to reduce the arrogance of the rich countries, and the disadvantaged class (laid off workers helped by self-proclaimed Messiahs in Armani jackets) in rich countries critical towards immigrants stealing jobs as factories are shipped out to low labor cost countries. Economic history being the common language of humanity for many years, it remains a key driver in the formation of new world orders, and always will (Fukuyama 1993: 73-86). Given this scenario, what role would rich nations play in such a new world order? The challenge is for these nations that succeeded economically and politically using different formulas to successfully manage a growing nation in a world that is becoming more complex to temper their zeal in exporting their systems. America, Japan, and Korea with its capitalist democracy, China and its capitalist communism, and Europe with its union of sovereign social democratic states are the three models from which the rest of the world could benefit. Russia is moving towards the China model, with Putin’s quasi-dictatorship evolving as a questionable substitute for China’s one-party rule. The threat of Arab terrorism, although of concern to these developed nations, is a matter that could be dealt with by looking at successful economic-political models in the Arab world, such as Arabia and the Gulf States with their “stable” monarchies and Egypt’s “democratic” capitalism. If these nations succeed, they can help balance the war between Israel and its neighboring Arab states that has gone on for centuries. The question is whether the U.S. can afford not to get involved. Works Cited Bush, George H.W. State of the Union Address, January 2001. 10 August 2007. . Fukuyama, Francis. State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. New York: Cornell University Press, 2004. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Kagan, Robert. Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order. New York: Knopf, 2003. Mahbubani, Kishore. “The West and the Rest.” The National Interest, summer (1992): 3-13. Russett, Bruce. Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Skidmore, David. “Huntington’s Clash Revisited.” Journal of World Systems Research, 4.2 (Fall 1998): 181-188. Read More